Summer in the Southern War
by xPhineasx
Summary: At the height of the Southern War, Surge finds himself with a deadly dose of toxin in his blood in a field hospital. There he meets a stoic fellow soldier who isn't much for small talk. Toxicbolt.


The thick night heat swamped every breath of air in the rank underbrush. There was a baited silence lurking in the dark among the dripping foliage and between the scattered night cries of feral zubat on the hunt. The 23rd ground division was crawling east, trying to get to their base camp before morning. They were supposed to rendezvous with one of the Flying brigades the day before, but the brigade never showed up. Left without air transport, they were sitting psyducks in hostile enemy territory. They had to get to safety, even if it meant trudging fifty miles through the jungle at night. No one spoke; who knew if there were enemy spies in the forest or a waiting ambush just over the next fallen log. The deep musk of damp and dirt mixed with their own fear, stagnant with sweat around them.

Matis Surge led the front of the line, picking his way through the deep brush carefully. His raichu skittered along at his side, keeping its ears peeled for any noise more worrying than the ambient hostile backdrop of the night noise. Surge was seventeen, though he had lied when he signed up for the Southern War and told the recruiting office he was twenty. He was a well built man, with striking yellow hair that gave him away as an American, and looked imposing in a fight. He had been put in charge of this little band of men and women after their commander had taken been taken out by enemy Pokemon attacks the week before. He felt unprepared to be in command. Most of the time he put on a big show, talking awful loud all the time about an awful lot of nothing; a facade of confidence, pushing his personality on others in careless exuberance. But now, in the heart of the jungle, with rain dripping down his collar and strange sounds in his ears, he found himself missing home and feeling uneasy. His dog tags weighed heavy around his neck, clinking softly with each careful bootfall.

Off beyond a small clearing in the trees, there came an unnatural metallic click. Raichu stopped, ears flaring up. Surge stopped as well, signaling for the others to still. They stood there, breathing shallow, not daring the move, straining their ears against the busy silence of the forest for a threat. After a moment, Surge let out a small breath and turned to tell the others to relax.

Then, all of a sudden, everything exploded in flames.

There was a slice of burning pain just under his knee and the blossoming overwhelming burn of heat inside of him. Surge could remember the fierce bellicose cries of enemy pokemon charging out of the canopy and the fluttering panicky need to find his Raichu through the pain.

And then the world went dark.

X x x

Flashes of fever dream clung to the edges of his mind as he tried to open his eyes. Sweat stagnated on his skin, his head swimming in a red hot soup of pain, the stench of rot and death clung to the roof of his mouth. The cold soft nose of his Raichu pressed against the palm of his burning hand, and Surge fell back into darkness.

The second time he tried to wake he managed to look around. A sagging burlap tarp ceiling greeted him, and through the haze of his burning mind he realized he was in a field hospital. His lips were cracked and dry, the only part of him that didn't seemed drenched in sweat.

A medic walked over. She was a young red-headed woman, though the dirt in her hair and the blood on her hands made her look formidable. "You woke up. That's a -prise. Good j-," she said her words blurring in and out of his mind. He could barely understand her as his brain struggled to focus. She picked up a clipboard next to him. "Do - rememb- your name, sol-?"

It took him a moment to understand the question, fighting through confusion. Everything seemed hard to hold onto. His head felt like it was full of cotton, hot, dry, and burning. "Matis Surge. 23rd ground. What happened?" he said, his voice rasping and burning in his throat. There was a deep enflamed pain under his right knee, spiderwebbing its way in his blood.

The woman dropped the clipboard back onto the table with a clattered. "You and - were ambush-. Some landmines and -okemon attacks. You took - worst of it. Others – okay – back in action - you have some kind of weir- -toxin in your blo-. - enemy must do - their Beedrills for - venom to cause this reacti- in humans. Just rest." He wanted to ask more questions, make her repeat what she said so he could understand, but she placed a damp lukewarm washcloth on his head and Surge found himself pulled back into the black.

X x x

When he woke up again, he was shivering. He shivered so hard it hurt his bones, but he couldn't make it stop. He looked down at himself, praying the actual damage wasn't as bad as it felt. His body seemed completed bandaged, and the clump of sour bandages at his knee turned his stomach. His eyes glassed over, not focusing as the nausea rolled through him. The fear was back now as he tried to remember what the doctor had told him. There was toxin in his blood, and he realized with a twisted panic that he was probably dying. Really, really, dying he thought with a stunned murky sort of panic.

He tried to look at the room around him, tried to get a feel for his surroundings, something to mentally stave off the building fear. The room he found himself in was bleak. The canvas walls were dirty, the floor was dirt. The few beds that were around him were inhabited by unconscious soldiers wrapped in bandages. It smelled like rot, and Surge tried not to think of why that was. The only person awake was the man in the bed next to him.

Surge took a moment to look at the man. The man had a slight build and a stern face. He was sitting up, reading through a small book that he held clutched between his fingers. He had hair as dark as pitch that was swept behind his ears and pointed up in little spikes. The lines under his eyes hinted at him being older than Surge, but then, basically everyone in the war was older than him. His arm was wrapped tight in bandages, but other than that he seemed fine. If nothing else, he was in a better state than Surge was. Seeing another person awake and alive in this place was comforting though.

"Hey," he croaked, trying to get the man's attention. His breathing felt ragged and strained. He was burning up. "Hey, what day is it?"

The man looked over at him, his eyebrows raised slightly as though he was amazed Surge was speaking. "July fourth, I think." He spoke in a light Kanto accent, in a formal sort of way.

"Hot damn," Surge said with a small attempt at a smile, but his breathing was still fast and shallow. "That's a holiday in my hometown." He lay there for a moment, trying to calm himself. He couldn't hold back the fear in his chest though. He was running a fever, the pain wouldn't abate, and he couldn't stop thinking about the poison in his blood.

"I ran away from home," Surge said, his voice creaking. Every nerve of him ached. His thoughts were going cloudy again. His short lived lucidity seemed to be slipping away as the pain creeped back. "And now I'm gunna die in this stinking pile of rot, and my pa's not gunna know why." He swallowed heavily, his throat dry and burning. "I'm never going to get to say sorry for not saying goodbye. I just wish that weren't true," he said and closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to look at the confused expression on the other man's face. "I...sorry." He breathed, realizing he as rambling. "I just...thought someone should know that," he muttered and fell back into his fevered sleep.

X x x

"Why did you run away?" The man asked.

Surge had slept for two days, fever nightmares keeping him restless the whole time. Nightmares of fire, and darkness, and his childhood wreathed in spikes and blood and everything that dreams could twist from his memories had haunted him. The doctor told him that the nightmares were just from the toxin working out of his system. As long as he kept breathing, he might live. The man in the bed next to him was still there when he came around, a fact that made Surge strangely pleased. His presence was a comfort in the sticky, sweltering heat and ceaseless pain.

"It's complicated," Surge said, not sure how to answer that question. His raichu was curled up at his side, napping. He patted its head softly. "I realized I wasn't gunna be the son he wanted. So I took off to spare us both the shit." It wasn't a lie, of course, but it was certainly a shallow answer. He couldn't dig into those issues with a stranger; he could barely dig into them alone. But his father wanted a normal son, and a daughter-in-law, and grandchildren someday, and even at 17, Surge knew that wasn't his life.

"So rather than dealing with parental disappointment, you decided to cross an ocean and get yourself killed fighting our war?" the man asked. It sounded rather insane when it was spoken out loud. The screech of wild venonats, tangula, and the far off suggestion of battles over the hills filtered into the hospital tent.

"Looks like it," Surge said, looking back at his raichu. "Maybe I'll go back there if I make it out of here. Explain myself." He tried to imagine it, back in the States, finding his dad. It all seemed so far away and impossible now. "What about you? What're your post-war-if-you-live plans?"

The man looked down at the little book he always had in his hands. Surge wondered what was in there that was so important. "I will return to my wife."

"Ah." It was an obvious short of answer. Surge laid back down, letting the conversation slip away. The pain in his leg was creeping back up, and somehow he lost the appetite for conversation.

x x x

The next time he woke up, the man in the bed next to him was gone. "He went back to the front," the doctor told him. Surge wondered if the man would ever get back to his wife.

Not that it mattered to him.

Within a week, Surge found himself back in the jungle, leading another group of young men and women through the underbrush. At night he lay flat on his back, his raichu curled on his chest, and tried not to think about the man he had bared his soul to in a fever fit.

Every night Surge did it again, as he fought and lived through the war he had made his own; every night after the war he did too.

X x x

x x x

Surge lit a red sparkler in the fading twilight and handed it to Janine. She laughed happily, taking it and running off to draw letters and shapes in the weak light. The goldeen in the pond swam lazily around, with the hum of venonat peacefully ebbing into the night air. The lanterns of Koga's gym burned into the young night, throwing soft warm pools light into the yard.

Koga walked over, a small cup of tea nursed in his hands. He sat down next to Surge on the porch and took a sip. "You aren't going to give up on this ridiculous Fourth of July holiday thing, are you?" he asked.

"It's a holiday in my hometown, Koga," Surge replied.

"It's also the anniversary of when we met," Koga said softly and took another quiet sip of tea. Surge stared at him for a moment, trying to read the expressionless look on other other man's face. Slowly, a smirk spread over Koga's thin lips. "You thought I forgot."

Surge laughed, embarrassed. "I sure did." He reached over, gently placing his hand on the back of Koga's neck, the calloused pads of his fingers twining in the soft ends of Koga's hair. Koga looked away, but moved into the touch silently.

"You primape," Koga said in a quiet, affectionate voice. In the garden, Janine lit herself a blue sparkler and the stars slowly blinked alive, cold and clean in the clear sky.


End file.
